DBAN not identifiying hard drive

[phv168]

Hello,

I'm trying to wipe my hard drive using DBAN. But when I boot from the CD and type autonuke. It then goes through the process and stops, stating that it could not complete the wipe because it could not detect the drive (suggest that I might need an updated driver, comp= 2013 Dell Precision T3600 and have had the same issue with two other T3600s).

I also retrieved and tried the latest version of DBAN, and used some other data wiping software resulting with the same problem.

Thanks for your assistance,
phv168

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, phv168.

Have you ever had any issues with your drive before that? Perhaps you could give it a try with a different SATA port and different cables, to see if the same thing happens. Download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and test the drive for errors and/or bad sectors, or at least to check its SMART data, to see what's the situation with it.
Another option would be to give it a go with Diskpart if you want to low level format the HDD. Here's what to do if you want to try it out:
1. Open CMD (Command Prompt) as administrator.
2. type diskpart and press "enter"
3. type list disk and press "enter", you'll see all the storage devices connected to your computer and you should be able to recognize the drive you wish to format by its size.
4. type select disk X and press "enter", where X is the number of the drive you wish to format, so make sure that you've selected the correct one - e.g. if the drive you wish to format is disk 1, type "select disk 1"
5. type clean and press "enter", then wait for the process to finish. You should see a message along the lines of "Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk". Note that this could take from a couple up, to several hours depending on the drive's size, since it basically wipes and overwrites each individual sector of the HDD.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD